TODD SEAVEY
author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Just What I Needed: Liberty! Micronauts! Spider-Man! Rock Tragedy!

If all has gone as planned, I’m in Boston as this post appears — the city of the entertaining and violent Boondock Saints and of the original (but not the last!) Tea Party, where dwell several of my college friends, including Dave Whitney, whose fortieth birthday some of us gathered to celebrate. I stayed with an actual family, the grown-up kind with law firm and hospital type jobs and two kids and everything.

2. The news that my own favorite toys and favorite resultant comic book from childhood — Micronauts — may be turned into a movie by no less an auteur than J.J. Abrams. Waiting for this news is one of the main reasons I have kept on living since age five. The world may see the resulting film — about robots and sci-fi creatures battling the evil Baron Karza and his minions, all of them tiny-sized beings from the subatomic Microverse — and think it looks just a bit too much like Star Wars. But I know Micronauts came first. Because I was there. Short of government ceasing to exist, this is about the best news I can imagine. It cannot possibly suck. Life would not be that cruel.

On a slightly more mature note, when Helen recently noted that there are few female film auteurs, I suggested Julie Taymor, director of Titus, Across the Universe, and soon a Helen Mirren, gender-reversed version of The Tempest, not to mention (if the financing holds) the Spider-Man stage musical with music by U2. She has the Grant Morrison-like attitude that sci-fi and comics and Shakespeare and psychedelia can all fit onto a larger palette of fantasy that needn’t be myopically focused on, say, Mr. Spock, nor be just for hardcore nerds, and that’s just fine with me. And here she is talking about Spider-Man (looking pretty charismatic in her late fifties, I might add).

P.S. The mention of U2 reminds me of a grimmer rock tidbit I just heard: J.D. Midnight Fortune, who a few years ago won the TV competition Rockstar: INXS to become the band’s new lead singer, has reportedly recently been living in his car, ousted from the band, and struggling with a cocaine habit. I guess if you do material as dark and powerful as that of INXS, you’re bound to end up autoerotically asphyxiated or living in a car.

Indeed — even Baron Karza (though the very Star Wars-like _comics_ came just _after_ Star Wars debuted). In fact, the toys have one of the most convoluted, Kevin Baconian histories imaginable, tying them to the manufacture of G.I. Joe, Transformers, and, crucially, the Japanese Microman toys.

I still remember my neighbor Danny Curran — older and in many ways wiser than I — predicting inaccurately that there’d be no great demand for Star Wars figures because we already had Micronauts, which were superior.

And, yes, that is a Terraphant sitting in my parents’ basement to this day — right near even more terrifying Hornetroid.